Original subtitles

Good morning. Welcome to the second of our three lectures on the art of Michelangelo.

Today, I'm concerned in part with the art historical significance of Michelangelo,

by which I mean his revivifying of the forms of antiquity and his ineradicable imprint upon the art of the future.

But Leonardo also enters into this lecture.

Two huge military paintings, the Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo and the Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo,

each about 60 feet wide, were commissioned by the Florentine government to decorate the Hall of the 500,

a newly built hall built for meetings of the Council of the Republic inside the Palazzo Vecchio.

Leonardo was the first to be commissioned in 153 to paint his mural.

His subject, the Battle of Anghiari, was a Florentine victory over Milanese forces in 1440.

In 154, Michelangelo was engaged to paint a companion scene on the same wall on the other side of the doorway.

It was called the Battle of Cascina.

The two works have not survived, and yet their impact on those who saw them, or the cartoons for them,

the designs for them, was profound and echoed down through the history of art.

And there were many copies.

We will look at a copy of Leonardo's Battle Scene first.

It is a copy, I should say, of the middle portion of the battle scene.

That is to say, all of the 60 feet had essentially a central scene and two flanking scenes.

The famous part was the center.

That's the part which has survived in the copies that we know.

In the early 17th century, the great Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens

drew this copy in chalk and pen and ink, a large drawing, about 18 inches by 25 inches,

and it's now in the Louvre, basing it on yet another copy, we presume,

since the original was by then long since lost.

Rubens also made a painted copy in oil on wood, twice the size of this drawing, or about 50 inches wide.

It's now in Vienna, in the academy there.

And there's another drawing, at least one other drawing by Rubens, of the same central group.

We don't know if he was copying the color from his source, because we don't know what the source was.

If he was copying a print or another drawing, he would have had to invent, as it were, his own color.

But it should be added that it is possible that he copied originals, which is to say parts of the cartoon,

or other studies that Leonardo kept and took with him to France at the end of his life,

and where Leonardo died, and where the things he had with them remained in the royal collection.

Rubens might have seen such original Leonardo drawings, fragments, after 1622, when he first visited Paris,

but we don't know, in fact.

There were other copies, certainly more than we know about today.

And Leonardo's painting is known through these copies,

although those by Peter Paul Rubens are now the best known.

The battle, which was, as I said, a victory of Florence over the Milanese army of Filippo Maria Visconti,

had been fought in 1440.

You may recall from the lecture on Piero della Francesca's Arezzo Fresco, of a battle scene,

that I mentioned that Anghiari was very near Sansepolcro, Piero's hometown,

and that Piero, as a young man of about 20, might have witnessed part of the Battle of Anghiari.

Although the battle subject was assigned to Leonardo,

the selection of a specific event from the battle and the presentation,

the method of presentation, was left to the artist.

He began work on the cartoon.

The cartoon to repeat is the full-scale drawing from which the design was transferred to the wall to be painted.

He began the cartoon for the Battle of Anghiari in 1503.

Leonardo chose, as his central motif, the battle for the standard, that is to say, the flag,

among four contending horsemen, plus three soldiers on the ground.

And the knot of interlocked combatants was a miracle of design.

Let's look at it for a moment, because when you first see it,

you see something which is heraldic, like a single unit,

and it's hard to pick out the constituent parts.

From the right, a horseman in violent battle, principally with a middle horseman,

whose head is here, and the head of whose horse is here.

The horse seems to be battling as well and attacking the horse to the right.

The third principal figure is this one on the horse to the left,

who looks back, twists around, looks back.

He has a saber in his belt.

It looks as though it's still not in action here,

but he is holding a spear, perhaps, at this point,

while he continues in the struggle.

There's a fourth horseman.

We don't see him immediately, but there's his head,

second from the right, right behind the head of the right-hand horseman.

He is here, so he's known principally only through that head.

He has to be on horseback.

He couldn't be that high otherwise.

On the ground, we have two figures struggling underneath this knot of horses,

one of them about to stab, or perhaps has stabbed with a short sword, the other.

And on the left-hand side, a figure who kneels under his shield,

holding his shield up as though to protect him from this mass of figures

that might come down upon him at any moment.

He's also thrown into a kind of shadow, a shaded area here,

and it provides a kind of base on that side for the whole of the composition.

It gives it a support that starts a curving movement.

If we were to start looking at this from the lower left,

a large curve which runs up through the heads of the figures and down the other side.

Another way in which the composition is strongly riveted

are by the great rumps of the two principal horses here,

which echo each other and which right and left block out that part of the painting.

But most fascinating in many ways is all of this congestion

and incredibly difficult interlocking, compositional interlocking,

of the various elements in the middle of the painting.

Right in the middle of the painting, or very nearly so,

is that wild eye of the horse that is behind the other two.

An extraordinary image if you just focus on that eye by itself.

It's worth mentioning that, though I'm not going to go into it,

that he had been working on ideas,

Leonardo had been working on ideas for an equestrian monument

of obviously a horse and rider.

And it was something that never in the long run got cast,

but it was on his mind for years.

And he did many designs for it,

and some of them relate to his design for the Battle of Anghiari.

When it came time to transfer this design to the wall

from his large cartoon,

which might have been made up of many pieces of paper

bound together with the drawing enlarged upon them,

and then you would fasten it to the wall,

prick the contours of it,

pounce it with a bag full of chalk or other material

which would go through those holes and leave the outline,

or you could incise the outline with the handle of the brush

or another tool in various ways

to leave the design on the wall surface

so that you could then begin the painting.

Well, when it came time for him to transfer this design to the wall,

and he had succeeded in doing so,

he began to paint.

Well, Leonardo experimented with a new technique.

We don't know what it is precisely was

because it hasn't survived,

but it was obviously a mixture of media as he had used for the Last Supper,

and in the same way it resulted in the rapid disintegration

of this painting almost before it was done.

One story is that during a cold spell,

a heater, a brazier of some sort,

was brought in to supply warmth to the artist as he worked on the wall,

and the heat caused the paint to start running off the wall.

So you can see it was very impermanent in that sense.

Now, there was something there for several decades

before it was eventually frescoed over by Vasari,

as a matter of fact, who ended up doing the entire hall later on.

But for a time, the unfinished painting remained on the wall,

and as long as fragments of the cartoon survived,

the design was seen by thousands, literally,

and copied by many artists.

And those records, those copies, guaranteed that the lost painting

would have a transforming effect on subsequent battle painting

all the way into the 19th century.

This fact attests, by the way, to the power of a concept of a design,

even in the absence of the original,

or when the original is badly damaged as with the Last Supper.

An example of the influence of the Battle of Anghiari from the 19th century

is this wonderful painting by Eugène Delacroix, the French Romantic painter.

It is called The Combat Between the Jaur and Hassan,

painted in 1835, now in the Petit Palais in Paris.

It is a theme from a dramatic poem by Lord Byron, known simply as the Jaur.

And he painted this battle scene twice.

And there is no question that in some way,

he based this composition on one of the copies,

one of the echoes, you might say, of Leonardo.

It's much simpler. It's two horses, not three riders or four,

but a very straightforward, as it were, battle of two figures.

But the way in which they interact and that extraordinary collision at the center

and the compositional linking of the two shows his debt to Leonardo.

Leonardo. When Leonardo had been at work on his cartoon for about a year,

Michelangelo was asked to supply a complimentary painting

in the same room of a military victory more distant in history,

the Battle of Cascina, which had been won against the Pisan army in 1364.

So, of course, he went to the old chronicles of the battle to read about it.

Again, although he was given the battle, the precise moment,

the choice of the moment in the battle was left to Michelangelo.

His painting of heroic nude soldiers rushing to get dressed to fend off a surprise attack,

was just as influential for painters of the figure in action as Leonardo's painting had been for

artist-seeking compositional mastery.

The choice of subject was extraordinary, even by, well, for anyone but Michelangelo, I suppose.

His interest in the male nude as an expressive vehicle was already well established,

and he selected a moment, related in the old chronicle,

when the Florentine soldiers were bathing in the Arno or resting nearby on a sweltering summer day.

And one of their comrades realized how unprepared and defenseless they were,

and he raised a false cry of alarm, announcing an imminent attack.

This false alarm caused the soldiers, as you see in this copy of Michelangelo's painting,

to frantically clamor from the river or to their feet, pulling on their clothes and their body armor as they go.

It is not the most glorious of military moments, but it allowed Michelangelo an unsurpassed opportunity

for a theme and variations on the male nude.

The denouement of the event, by the way, was that the Florentines, chastened by the demonstration

of their laxness, prepared for battle and the next day launched a victorious attack.

The painting from the completed cartoon was scarcely begun, for reasons we shall see.

But the cartoon survived for a considerable time, and engravings and drawings were made of parts of it,

and Michelangelo's own preparatory drawings for it were seen by some.

And in all of these ways, the impact of his individual figures was widely apparent in the work of later artists.

But there is only one complete record of the composition, or rather the central part of it, that survives,

and we've been looking at it.

It is a large copy, 30 by 52 inches, approximately, about the same size as Rubin's copy of the Leonardo.

Here in grisaille, which is to say, monochrome painting, monochrome paints on paper,

probably made by an artist named Aristotile, Aristotile de Sangalo, a large family of Sangalo's architects and painters, around 1542.

This had an even greater effect on those who saw it,

and established Michelangelo's repertory of expressive poses as models for any artist dealing with the nude figure.

I meant to say an even greater impact than the copies of Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari had had.

This work through this large copy and others resonated down through art history.

Once again, our example of this influence is by Rubin's.

While working at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, Peter Paul Rubin's traveled widely in Italy,

he was there for eight years, and he must have seen and copied an earlier copy of Michelangelo's cartoon.

In any event, he borrowed heavily from it for the right-hand side of a large composition

of the baptism of Christ that he was painting for the Jesuit church in Mantua.

Before I let this image go for that, for the Rubins, let me take one more minute to look at it.

There are several particular figures that I want to call to your attention, including this one in the right

foreground, who is pulling on his hose, as it were, his hosen here, and seated back,

and it's a very striking pose, as you can see.

Some of these poses appear to be mirror images, one of another.

There is a great deal of elaborate contrapposto in the figures, figures clamoring out, as you see

here, seen in foreshortening from behind.

Here at the bottom, just a pair of hands pleading for a little help getting out of the Arno,

I guess, at this point. This painting too, by the way, the original, had paintings on either side of it,

on that same wall 60 feet wide. It too was set up almost like a triptych, a large centerpiece which

became famous, and two flanking groups which are less well known, historically only some echoes of

them in drawings by the artist. The painting that Rubins was making, in which he drew upon his knowledge

of this, was for the Jesuit church in Mantua, and there he incorporated or adapted some of the dramatic

poses which are in the Battle of Kashina. And they clearly demonstrate the fame of the invention.

Look at the right hand side, for instance, and you see at the lower right, that figure pulling on his hose,

he's reversed, and that is the only change. And there are other figures here who derive from it,

and some have been reversed or adapted to it. And there's another direct Michelangelo reference,

and that's the figure of Christ in the baptism on the left hand side, who is borrowed almost verbatim

from a painting done by one artist, Sebastiano del Piombo, in a church in Rome, in a chapel in Rome,

but designed by Michelangelo. So it is Michelangelo's design which is being quoted there as well. The

transfer of Michelangelo's cartoon to the wall had been interrupted by a call from Rome, from the Pope,

in 1505, when Julius II summoned the artist to design his tomb for St. Peter's Basilica, then being rebuilt.

Although Michelangelo apparently began the actual painting by November 1506,

during a two-month stay in Florence, the painting was never completed.

Let me show you briefly a map of Rome where we've spent some time but not looked at a map.

Ancient Rome is down here, that is to say the ancient

Rome that we're most aware of, the Colosseum here, the Arch of Constantine about here, the Forum

approximately here. This would be the Capitoline Hill, the ancient and Renaissance capital as well,

the Via del Corso leading up to the northern gate of the city at Porto del Popolo. On the other side of

the Tiber, which snakes on through, we have Castel San Angelo, the famous fortress, and behind that,

Vatican City with St. Peter's in this design, showing it as it is today in its final Baroque adaptation. I will

show you a detail of this area, the apse area of St. Peter's, in a few moments. But I wanted to give you

some idea of the layout of the city, or bring it back to your mind, as the case may be.

Michelangelo's return to Rome was under quite different circumstances than his initial visit had

been, for it was at papal command, and for a project whose size can scarcely be imagined. Rome was a city

still rooted in the Middle Ages. But a pope from the Dollar Rovere family, Sixtus IV, had begun to chart

a course for its revival when he commissioned the building and decoration of a new papal chapel,

the Sistine Chapel, thus introducing the Florentine Renaissance into the Vatican with one sweeping act.

The rest of Rome and its aristocracy began to emulate the new style. That was, of course, in 1482,

and we've touched on it and will again. Julius II was from the same family as Sixtus IV. He was also a

Dollar Rovere, and his decision to demolish the thousand-year-old Constantinian Basilica of St. Peter's

and replace it with a huge new one was, to him, a logical continuation of his uncle's initiative.

Here is a plan for the new St. Peter's. Old St. Peter's, of course, was a typical church,

that is to say, a traditional form with a long nave and the apse at the end,

the Basilican form in short. When new St. Peter's was designed, it was designed in a very different way.

Old St. Peter's was replete with tombs of popes and other prelates, but they resided more or less modestly

inside chapels and in aisles. Julius II determined to make his tomb inside the new church that he was

building. He had the Constantinian Basilica torn down and a new church begun, and his tomb was

going to be there and it was going to be a unity with the new St. Peter's. He dictated that it be

placed at the center of the vast crossing being designed, at the circle in the middle of this

of this four-armed design of this absolutely symmetrical design. That would have been the place

of the pope. Well, what for his tomb? What lies below that? Supposedly the grave of St. Peter,

the first pope, beneath ground in the catacomb below. And under the proposed dome, which did get

built in a way, would reside this very large tomb. Several architects advanced plans for the new basilica,

but it was Donato Bramante, whose work we saw in Milan at Santa Maria delle Grazie, whose plan and

elevation were initially followed most closely. This central plan is something that is central to

Renaissance thinking. More of it was more talked about than actually created, but it was

very important to Renaissance thought to have this equilateral design, this absolutely balanced design.

Michelangelo, by the way, did not regard Bramante very kindly, but his own design for Julius's tomb

would be inextricably linked to the architecture. The tomb itself would have been a very large architectural

unit with the bier and effigy of the pope, destined for the summit of a three-tiered pyramid and a multitude of

sculptures attached to it. It recalled imperial Roman funeral pyres and signified the pope's concept of himself

as a new Caesar. Imagine if you can the huge tomb in the exact center of this new church beneath this dome.

That's the dome as it is today and much as was planned. Where you see the famous 17th century

Baldacchino by Bernini at the bottom of this image would have been the tomb, about the same height,

about the height of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. This indicates something of the pope's grand aspirations.

Michelangelo spent eight months at Carrara, where the famous quarries were and are, overseeing the quarrying of

the necessary stone for the mausoleum, then returned to Rome at the end of 1505 to await the arrival of the

material. At the beginning of 1506, on the 14th of January, a great archaeological discovery was made.

In a vineyard on the Esquilin Hill, near the ruins of the Baths of Trajan, a famous Hellenistic sculptural

group, the Laocuan, was discovered. Michelangelo and the architect Giuliano da Sangallo were sent by

Julius II to examine it and authenticate it as the work described by Pliny the Elder in his first century

AD natural history. It was described there as the masterpiece of the arts. The group represented the

priest of Apollo, Laocuan, and his sons, strangled by a serpent for revealing the deception of the Trojan

horse, told in Virgil's Aeneid. Michelangelo, present at the excavation of this masterpiece,

assisted in its restoration. He even reconstructed a missing right arm, which now, after a different

reconstruction, is still preserved on the back of the statue's base. And he acquired a profound

comprehension of this work. His intimate knowledge of this dynamic group fueled his art for the rest of

his life. Indeed, it even entered into the Battle of Cascina, on which he was still working at that moment.

The Laocuan, internalized, served as a source of emotive poses for the tomb project and for the Sistine

ceiling. Then, abruptly and capriciously, Julius II put aside his plan for his tomb and ordered

Michelangelo instead to paint the vast ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, to which we will turn in the next

lecture. Ultimately, Michelangelo had no choice but to put aside the tomb project to work on the Sistine

ceiling. But he was furious first, and he fled Rome for Florence in August 156, without permission,

without papal permission. Reconciled with the pope sometime later, he joined the pope in Bologna,

which had just been reconquered for the papal states, and he remained there for some 15 months,

designing and casting a colossal bronze statue of Julius. Returning to Rome by April 158,

he reluctantly began preparations for the ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel. But the tomb project

was never forgotten, least of all by Michelangelo. And during his more than four years' labor in the

Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo continued to meditate on his ideas for the tomb. The pope died less than four

months after the ceiling was completed. And then, the artist signed a second contract for the tomb with

the heirs of Julius II. By now, however, the grandiose plans for the tomb were essentially doomed,

although the project was to drag on unresolved for another thirty years. With a Medici pope,

Leo X, on the throne, Julius's much reduced tomb was naturally relegated to a position of secondary

importance, and in fact, eventually to another church, San Pietro in Vincoli. The Della Rovere heirs,

the Della Rovere heirs were disinclined to spend much of their inheritance on the tomb. Two of

Michelangelo's most famous sculptures, the so-called slaves, were conceived as part of the original project

for the tomb, but were separated from it as the project shrank. They found their way to France, and they

have long been in the Louvre where they have had a continuing influence on artists. Still, they represent

an essential aspect of the original tomb program and are only fully comprehensible as part of it. The Dying Slave,

as it is now universally known, was made perhaps about 1514, soon after the completion of the Sistine

Ceiling in October of 1512. It has this famous image, this famous sculpture, an expressive lassitude,

a physical lassitude, that has, I think, less the appearance of approaching death than of the moment

before awakening from sleep. One possible explanation of the appearance of it is the Neoplatonic concept of

the body as the soul's prison and death as its release, waking into eternal life. In this view, the sculpture

combines sensuality, which is remarkable in this work, and spirituality in equal amounts. The so-called

rebellious slave, also in the Louvre, begun soon after, we assume, neither of these sculptures is

finished, exhibits a more intense struggle that will lead to the soul's release. Both of the slaves should be

visualized, by the way, as essentially attached to the base of the original three-tiered pyramid. They're not

sculptures in the round. An alternative and more traditional interpretation is that these figures and others like them on the

proposed tomb symbolize the arts, which languished at Julius's death. The Moses, carved about 1515-16,

an overwhelming figure which was intended to be placed at one of the corners of the second story of the tomb,

is the only statue from the original design to become part of the much diminished final tomb.

Moses, the great lawgiver, the priest, the leader of his people, was central to the pope's image of himself, as Moses had been for Sixtus IV in the first Sistine Chapel decorations.

The carving of this is astonishing, simply technically. The depth of cutting, look around the knee, for instance, with this great drapery over it, impossible to imagine.

The skill that it took to carve deeply between knee and drapery, or the area of the book, or the hands famously

tucked into the immense beard of the figure. It is an extraordinary achievement. Technically, that alone is remarkable.

Something that you are perhaps familiar with, and may know the explanation for, are the famous horns on Moses. If you look at his head,

he has horns. On his second descent from Mount Sinai, Moses' face, or head, was described as shining.

Apparently, the Latin translation of the Hebrew word for shining would be corona, circular crown,

halo, and instead, apparently by accident, or otherwise, the Vulgate, the Latin Bible, rendered it as cornutus,

horned. The extraordinary vitality of the pose, as Moses is about to rise in wrath, and of his flashing face,

seemed to be Michelangelo's reimagining of the powerful body and agonized face of Laocoon,

but now as a visionary and angry priest, not as a doomed one.

The great statue of the prophet is one of the orphans from Michelangelo's largest sculptural project,

the tomb of Julius II. Instead of dominating the new basilica of St. Peter's, the tomb ended up,

a sad shadow of its intended greatness, in San Pietro in Vincoli, but in its center, at its center,

is this extraordinary Moses, who appears about to rise in anger, rise from his seat in wrath,

at the moment, perhaps, when he will soon break the tablets of the law in the face of the Hebrew's

disobedience. It is an astounding piece of work on a sad final vestige of a tomb, one that haunted

Michelangelo, all of his adult life. Thank you for your attention.